2017-01-07talkmarkets.com

Federal Reserve Chair Janet Yellen has been adamant that economic cycles can't die of old age. At the end of this month, we can proclaim to be living through the third longest expansion in postwar times. The parlor game occupying those on the Street these days entails devising scenarios that can push us into the second, or dare we dream, longest expansion of all.

... If we do get [to sub-4.0 unemployment this year], a big if, we are sure to be staring down the barrel of appreciably higher interest rates and a flat, if not by then, inverted yield curve. The only precedent is, you guessed it, that which occurred in 2000, when the unemployment rate hit 3.6 percent as the longest cycle of all time was finally flaming out. Economics 101 teaches one tenet above all -- that the unemployment rate is the most lagging within the data universe.



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